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Replace the hard drive immediately. Get a 7200RPM as a boot drive and use the 1.5T as a media storage.
If you get anything faster (SSD, 10000 RPM), you can break the motherboard. Well, I broke my motherboard with a 10K drive when I used one of these HP things (so said all of the smart geeks who attempted to fix it, based on the documentation they found).

Very nice Specs for all the show they put on but...question?
I run a 2.8 quad core with a 750 GB sata drive, and a Nvidia 550 TI on a 550w power supply because its better to over rate then under rate...How does all their shenanigans run on a 300w? Seriously, Can I just buy the magic power supply?

@innsomatic: LOL, I was curious about that too... The graphics card alone recommends a 400 watt power supply.... Oh, wait isn't this an HP... It will break and turn into another refurb, it scares me when you go to microcenter, new egg, or any other web site how many refurbs are HP's....

It will run Diablo3 but not very good, in high traffic packs it will most likely start choking on high graphics. It's a low end probably integrated 7450 HD, they're not very powerful and not exactly meant for gaming either. They only carry 160 stream processors where the 6870's and all the mid top end cards are well above 960-1600 stream processors. So video wise you are quite weak with this machine.

@abuekeg919: you sure...i mean i'm not a ATI guy, but I was running D3 at 720 high graphics with no shadows AA on, with a Nvidia 9800Gt. This is higher then that I thought, but i'm also not an ATI guy. When you say integrated though, I believe you, Integrated = Not very good.

This does have an actual graphics card, but it is a pretty weak one. More than enough for mild gaming, but more demanding games will require a much better card, which will require a much bigger power supply...yada,yada,yada. You all have heard this before! If you are looking for a PC that can burn through internet sites and stream HD video, though, than this thing will meet your needs...as long as it works!

The 7450 isn't integrated graphics, it is an actual PCIe graphics card. However, it's extremely weak, and only slightly better than Intel integrated graphics.

Here's a list "ranking" gpu's (you might have to do a "ctrl+f" search to find stuff). Unfortunately the 7450 isn't on there, probably because you currently can't buy it separate, however the 6450 performs pretty much exactly the same, and you can compare how much higher up your 9800 is compared to the 6450.

@turruso: processor is trivially better for most purposes, as 6 cores only gets you more threads, which programs don't use effectively yet.
Graphics card is worse than the one you have now.
And I promise your power supply is better than the one in there.

tl;dr
Don't buy this thing. If you need to upgrade, get a higher end graphics card, but I imagine you're probably okay for most applications for a while.

This is a decent price for the core of a pretty good gaming system. Upgrade the power supply and consider a graphics card upgrade, and you should be set for awhile. The "refurbished" label's the only thing making me hesitate at all on this deal.

For those who said "replace the hard drive", it's ALWAYS going to be the bottleneck in your system unless you've got a solid state drive these days. That's just not getting any better as processors and memory get faster. For those buying it to use "as is"? What it's got is good enough. For those looking to upgrade it as a hardcore gaming PC? You may be able to squeak a couple percentage points on benchmarks but odds are good you won't notice the difference without doubling the HDD speed. And that risks breaking the motherboard, as the previous posters have warned.

I debated about it for a bit. I can't see passing it up when no matter the reviews or comments, its an upgrade for my wife's Pentium D. Its an HP as well and certainly served her well. While I'm at it, its an upgrade for me as well. Down for 2.

@shdwsng: A good practice when trying to make your PC faster is to focus on expanding the bottlenecks. The storage disk and RAM are the two biggest ones, really. Too many people buy insanely fast CPUs and wonder why their machine doesn't seem much faster, even under heavy computational load. It's disk and RAM latency. And previous posters have said a 7200 RPM drive won't break the mobo.

Also, these days, 5400 RPM drives aren't the turtles they used to be. Of course they're slower than higher-RPM drives, but few users are going to notice the difference, since most of the performance gain is in seek time and things like games don't care much about that, as they load data nearly sequentially.

Yes the processor is weaker, and it's $100 more, but you won't have to change the hard drive, video card, and power supply. Plus I see in the reviews that these machines don't come with crap ware that the big manufacturers like HP and Dell load.

I would definitely like to get into the brain of the engineers at HP that configure these PCs. On one hand they are putting a 6 core processor + 10gb of memory into a machine with a 5400rpm HD. Then to boot- they are using a power supply that has a max rating of 300 watts. I don't hate HP, and I have several HP computers that have worked great for me. I am just confused because I think my 6 year old son has better insight on more logical configurations. This should have been configured with a 430 watt power supply and a 1TB 7200rpm instead of the 1.5TB 5400rpm and 300 watt power supply, and I bet the cost of the system to HP would have been a wash.

Tough crowd! Was waiting for the 'No USB 3?'..no wait .. it has it. Was waiting for the 'Only 6 GB?'..no wait.. it has 10. 'No Bluetooth?' .. has it. 'Integrated Graphics?'.. separate Board. For only $539, this seems to be a pretty decent machine with many of the features we've been looking for. Is it Alienware..no .. but it also doesn't cost $3000. Maybe in for 1 this go around (have used HP for years and outside of the bloatware removal at the onset, never had problems).

Does anybody have any thoughts on using this as a development machine? I have a nice (but old Dell) that has served me well and I was thinking of upgrading to a new i7 based Dell. This seems like a pretty good package. I'm guessing 6 core would make compiling nice and zippy!

@kay0sth30ry: Not so fast. This HP has a better processor (not just because 6 cores, but because the passmark rating is about 1600 points higher-5600 vs 4000 approx) and the HP has USB 3.0 already. The video card on the HP is not horrible unless you decide to do serious gaming-98% of most users would be fine with that video card. The HP power supply is anemic, but if you have any issues spend about $40 get a decent power supply - this will work http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182075

@shelburnecountrystore: Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is a bad deal- I just think it's an odd configuration of components. it almost seems that there was left over inventory of stuff and they just threw it all together. The value is there- the configuration is odd.

I wanted a basic home PC (web surfing, some word processing), and something that could handle HD video editing. This seems like it should more than fit the bill, and it blows the machine I have now out of the water.

I've got a 650 watt PSU kicking around that I can swap in. I'm looking around for a harddrive (newegg has a 3tb Seagate external drive on sale for $139; I've thought about getting that & pulling the drive out & installing it in this machine).

Any recommendations on a graphics card? Links to cheap 7200 rpm harddrives? And should I steer clear of an SSD boot drive?

I don't think anyone else has pointed this out so far, so I will. I can't figure out the memory configurations on a lot of modern computers. 10GB is a very strange amount of RAM, and the reason is that it has 3 DIMMs installed. My guess is 4+4+2, but could be 8+1+1. In any case, that kills the ability of the system to use the RAM in dual channel out of the box. I understand that the benefits of dual channel memory only come to light in some circumstances, but I just wanted to bring this to light. Not really sure why a lot of manufacturers have been doing this lately.

@sfidance: It's all marketing now. 10gb will not give you any advantage over 8gb. But DDR3 is so cheap, that everyone has been upping the RAM in their machines. HP probably bought (or is contracted)a boatload of the 2gb modules that are almost obsolete since everyone is using the 4gb modules, so what they do is throw one of these in their machine because 10gb looks better than 8gb when most people are comparing specs. It really doesn't add performance, and it could slightly hinder performance depending on the motherboard.

I've wanted to add more ram to it but have no idea if it can handle it ?
It's still going strong, but I would love to have better sound, USB 3.0, Bluetooth, and a hopefully otherwise faster machine than mine all the way around. Although my HD is 7200 on my old gateway. I just wish this HP had Blu-ray. It would be a no brainer for me. I'm also not a gamer so no worries there. I just watch/stream a lot of movies, listen to tunes, and surf. I guess my main concern would be it failing.

@tphili17: If your HP was anything like mine, HP broke the motherboard when you installed a new drive. I used to be a big fan of HP; now, I will never buy one again.

HP has the charming practice of creating a "tattoo" that identifies the hard drive to the motherboard. If a new hard drive does not have that tattoo, the motherboard will not recognize it and will refuse to work with it. Thus, if your hard drive goes bad, you are forced to buy the new one from them, or replace your computer.

When I finally accepted this fact (my hard drive failed a SMART test on 5/6*), I asked them to tattoo the replacement drive I purchased. They won't do it. I then asked to buy a new drive from them, to avoid buying a new computer. The only thing they had available was a drive half the size of the original (500GB instead of 1TB). I hung up before getting a price, afraid I'd cuss someone out.

I had to replace the motherboard, which meant I had to replace the case (YMMV; it was because I bought a rectangle standard shape MB instead of the square shape like the original setup had). And then I had to replace that 300W power supply, not because it was so small, but because the CPU power cable/wire was too short to reach in the new case.
Also, that lovely HP power supply doesn't have its own independent on/off button, which is horrendous if you're having trouble with the power connection in the new case....

So, ultimately, when I wanted to replace my hard drive, I had to replace my HD, MB, case, and power supply. The only components I could keep were the CPU and DVD player & my [aftermarket] graphics card.

That computer was purchased in July of 2010. I suppose they could have ceased the tattooing practices, but I can safely guess that the 300W power supply is the same junky one that won't reach across the case and doesn't have an on-off switch.

Last year I bought a new Dell computer and build four computers. I have bought refurbished HP computers in the pass. This computer is not a good deal. The specs look good but it not the right computer for many people at its price. If the price was $150 to $200 less it would be worth buying. It's too powerful for the causal user (web browsing and lite word processing) but yet not good enough for gaming or photo shopping or using it as a base for upgrading. My rule for buying a OEM computer is dose it does what I need it for and is less that what it cost for me to build. If you really know how to mod OEM computers then you can build one. There's too many things to change in this computer to improve it. It would be less money to buy a better one or build one.

@rammerjammer: I think you are better off with this than the IBUYPOWER deal above. The videocard in this is fine for what you need, the HD even though it is 5400 rpm is probably faster than what is in your current PC even though your current PC has a 7200 rpm drive. The technology of the newer drives makes them faster at a lower speed than the older generation. For instance: this Samsung HD154UI 1.5tb 5400rpm drive has a benchmark of 545, this WDC WD7500AAKS 7200 rpm 750gb drive has a benchmark of 510 (look these up on passmark if you want). I don't know what brand drive is in this PC, I was just giving an example. Ideally you would want to update this drive to an SSD (clone your OS to this drive) and use the one it comes with as storage. The SSD would speed things up tremendously when it comes to photoshop rendering (much more than 7200rpm drive).Processor in this PC is significantly faster than the IBUYPOWER,using photoshop, it will take advantage of the additional cores.

HP does not key Windows to the motherboard. Microsoft does that. You have OEM version of Windows on the hard drive and it's keyed to the OEM motherboard. A full version of Windows is twice the price of a OEM version. What you do when you replace a hard drive or motherboard is to call Microsoft to request a new activation key for Windows. That so people wouldn't clone the hard drive and use it on several computers.

@guswalken: This is definitely better. Even though this is a 5400 rpm drive it's probably no slower than the older 7200 rpm drive. The videocard here is fine for HTPC. It's probably pretty quiet. The processor may seem like overkill, unless you start converting blu-ray, copying blu-ray, video editing, or using cable cards with 4 hi def tuners- then you will clearly be happy to have that processing power. I have built 8 different home theater PC's- this would be a good one to start with and buy a blu-ray burner for it. If you get power issues you may have to upgrade the power supply, but you are only talking about $40. If the HD is sluggish, you can always add a 7200 rpm drive and use the 1.5TB as storage- it won't go unused.

@gak0090, 5400RPM is definitely not better than any 7200RPM drive. The RPM directly affect seek times and throughput, since the higher the RPM, the faster it will reach sectors on the other side of the platter.

I'm surprised nobody is talking about the motherboard, which is also very, very low-end. The Motherboard controls the data passing to each component, and the lower-quality motherboards are less able to deliver.
I had an HP from WOOT. Hooked up a second drive inside as a backup and began copying from one drive to another. I got about 10MB/s transfer rate.
That board died so I had to get a new one: 80MB/s transfer rate with the same exact drives.
A good quality motherboard gets all of the components talking much faster, which makes for a much better overall computer experience, regardless of usage.

@goodeggray: I agree. When you get a new pc you are prompted to make recovery discs in case one day you do need to replace the HD. The HD can be changed/cloned as long as it is attached to the original MB.

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